City faces suit over document redacting

Watchdog group says officials withholding public information

Published 12:26 AM MST Jan 30, 2013

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. -

The city is the subject of a lawsuit that claims officials are withholding information the public has the right to see.

Online watchdog group Policecomplaints.info, which investigates law enforcement departments and officers across the country, said that despite repeated complaints, the city continues to improperly withhold public information.

Anna Martinez has filed a lawsuit against the city on behalf of the watchdog group.

"Everything is redacted other than the officer's name, and it's not even a full name there that you can see," she said, looking at one of the documents in question. "There is no other information within this citizen's complaint."

The redacted documents are useless to anyone trying to review the complaints, and this isn't the first time the city has supplied such material. Last month, Action 7 News requested and received a stack of illegally redacted citizen complaints against another officer.

This was after Public Radio KUNM received the same results. City officials told Action 7 News that they had made an honest mistake and gave the station the corrected versions. They said their personnel would be retrained.

"So when we're getting stuff like this, there's no way that we can really be sure of what's going on, and it's the citizens' rights to know," Martinez said.

The city said the error was a good-faith mistake and it provided the corrected documents and personnel have been retrained.

The lawsuit, however, has not been resolved.

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